Homework.......and reputation

Last night Joey came home with some homework. It was a planning sheet for a piece of recount writing and contained a small box in which Joey seemed to think he was supposed to write an account of his childhood. There were a few reminders on the side like "use time connectives" and "make sure events are in chronological order", but Joey seemed pretty clueless as to what these meant. In fact he was increasingly vague about what he had to do at all. We tried to work out if he just hadn’t been listening in class or whether the teacher hadn’t explained properly. Initially blank looks soon started to morph into rising panic as the poor boy tried to remember/guess what he was supposed to be doing…..so we left it there and got down to the time-consuming business of helping him plan a recount text.

Why was he given this homework? Was it something that hadn’t been finished in class? Was it so that we as parents could do the teacher’s job, and teach our child about (yaaaaawwwwnnnn) recount writing? This was the first piece of homework Joey had had from this particular teacher. Why now?

My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that it’s Parents’Evening next week. If you’re anything but a top-notch teacher, then you dread parents’evening. It’s an opportunity for parents to come in and put you on the spot with difficult questions to which you’ve had no time to prepare answers. If you’re a decent teacher, or at least have a decent reputation (unless they help out in class, parents rarely have much idea about what goes on in school) they can be fun of course, because you’ll often get glowing praise from parents who compare you to the idiot who ‘taught’ their child the previous year. This particular teacher, from the few clues we’ve had so far, is of the former variety (I’ll talk a bit more about her in a future blog), and I would wager that the homework is her rather desperate way of impressing the parents because parents LOVE homework. In fact I would almost go as far to say that if you want to get a good reputation as a teacher, then set homework every night and you’ll be laughing.

Cynical I know, but I think it is the main reason that primary schools send work home at all. When I started teaching in 1990 it was rarely given other than a bit of reading and some weekly spellings. Nowadays there is increasing pressure to set homework, not just to the oldest kids but also to Reception age children. The poor wee things have just spent a long day at school, working and playing their hardest we hope, when they arrive home to be greeted with yet more school work. If they’re lucky they’ll get it finished just in time to squeeze in something to eat before rushing off to their after-school club. And if it’s anything like our house, that means stress.

What makes the gratuitous setting of homework even more baffling is that teachers hate it. Why? Because it means more marking (unless you’re Joey’s teacher- another blog, another time!), and teachers hate marking. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if you knew that the child had actually done the work herself, but seeing as it’s quite obviously been completed (immaculately) by an older sibling or parent, it feels a particular waste of time and energy.

So the children hate it, teachers hate it, and some (highly stressed) parents hate it, so why on earth do so many parents demand it? The answer lies, I think, in our experiences this year with Lily. Lily was given the dubious distinction at the start of the school year of being placed in a class with a teacher whose reputation has got to be the worst I’ve ever encountered. Every parent I spoke to assured me that she was an awful teacher, and were full of grisly tales of her extraordinary incompetence. I even heard that a group of parents a few years earlier had hired a lawyer to try to get her sacked. We decided to give the poor woman a chance, and so far we’re really happy with Lily’s progress and experience this year.

How do we know about Lily’s progress? Partly by observing how happy she is, and that she’s made friends. But we haven’t seen her school work, haven’t worked in the classroom and haven’t spoken to the teacher at parents’ evening yet, so how can do we know anything about her academic progress? Yes, you’ve guessed it……HOMEWORK. Every night Lily is expected to do 15 minutes of reading, and 15 minutes of another activity, usually either spelling, maths or something designed to improve her thinking skills. It is a bind, it does lead to some pretty stressful, rushed evenings, and I wish it wasn’t quite so relentless, but it does have several benefits.

Firstly, and I think most importantly to lots of parents, even if she’s not doing much else at school (although I’m sure she is), we know that she is learning something because we’re right there supervising her and helping if necessary. This reason was particularly important to parents in a fee-paying school I worked in, who needed more than most to see concrete evidence of value for their sizeable investment.

Secondly, it gets us involved with her learning so that we can praise her for her successes and help her with her weaknesses. Thirdly, it enables us to actually observe her progress. We can see with our own eyes how much her reading has improved, and her handwriting is almost unrecognisable from the hotchpotch of different-sized scribbles she used 3 months ago. OK, so we’re the ones doing a lot of the actual "teaching" but the teacher has set up the opportunity and the activities.

Most revealingly for me, it’s the first time as a parent that I’ve truly experienced a proper learning partnership, where all 3 parties are genuinely contributing to a child’s progress.

So, am I a convert to the big H? It depends. Not if there’s no good reason for it and definitely not if there’s no benefit to the child. I still think the school day is long enough and that a good teacher should be packing enough learning and stimuli into it so that the children have earned a decent break at the end of it. I don’t really think there’s a need for more than a bit of reading and maybe some tables or spellings to learn.

Looks like it just comes down to good teaching. But how do we know if our child’s teacher is any good? After all, we don’t want to rely on reputation!